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Jack – Black Jack

Mistakes from the past can fall back on your future. Even when they represent gold mines for your present. Jack Unterweger is really existed: robber and murderer, but also poet and writer. A deforming mirror of modern society, a creative who thought to be a different criminal – a refined one – finding into writing a way to have his moral redemption and his revenge, during 15 years prison. The poet-jailbird conquered women who were writing to him, the Austrian radical chic cultural gatherings and the talk shows which were used to take advantage of him. Or maybe it was him taking advantage of them, who knows. A fascinating and contradictory story told by Elisabeth Scharang starring Johannes Krisch who mixes Pasolini with Wahrol – a mix which is quite representative – being able to become a capricious star, a tender lover, a dark god or a fragile wanderer with a few gestures. Jack shows how a renaissance parable can be interrupted by past, a heavy burden in his own and others' memory.

Actually Unterweger found again death on his road when the prejudice's suffocating noose was tied around him, long before the proofs nailed him in an illegal sentence, while he was refusing every accusation with the same resoluteness he had showed admitting every responsibility in the past. In the movie Scharang travels into minds, in the sense and behaviour overturnings, in a show society which loves nonconformity, outcasts, but only if they are playing the role of puppets in their own vanity. She also allows herself an unscrupulous hypothesis you will notice only if you'll pay much attention. And she offers us an existential and essential noir about the fact that are exactly the progressives to condemn to a life sentence those whom already paid.